Portfolio Manager Overcomes Overwhelm and Secures Dream Job Through Executive Coaching

Hi, my name is Kelli Washington. I am a chartered financial analyst and a portfolio manager for a nonprofit hospital in Cleveland, Ohio. And five years ago I hired Karen Davis to be my personal coach because I was looking for someone who could help me move to the next level both in a professional and a personal context. So I highly recommend Karen Davis because she is great at helping her clients set their goals, be accountable for those goals and ultimately achieve them. So my professional experience before working with Karen was absolutely a state of overwhelm. I had started a relatively new role, I was one year into it and just really trying to figure out how to do my job well in a very chaotic environment especially in financial services and so really just needed some help and guidance into how to think about that, how to structure it, how to understand where I was strong and where I was weak and how I could improve my own skillset. So my overall hesitation around hiring a coach in general was about finding the right person and really making sure that I had the opportunity to have a great working relationship with them and all of that went away with Karen because she did something that was important to me. We had a conversation first and one of the key questions I asked her is how do you select the clients that you want to work with? How do you think about that? And her answer just nailed it for me it's important especially in this type of work it was important to me have a really solid personal connection with the person and she talked through that process and that in and of itself was what really made sealed the deal for me. So what made me decide to trust Karen and ultimately work with her was our first conversation where frankly I was a bit of a mess and her willingness to embrace that mess and help me think through with and again I hadn't paid her a dime at but her willingness to embrace that mess helped me think through how to manage it, what were some of the things that were triggering me and how I could be in a better place at the end of our first conversation and that literally sealed the deal for me. So my initial work with her was through an Accelerator and was still little hesitant around the full coaching experience and so I thought the Accelerator would be a great place to start and I think just Karen's way of structuring it I tend to think one plus one equals two, I'm a math person. Her structure of it was really important the way in which she guided me through the day, the way in which she guided me to set goals and objectives and think about what that looked like and importantly her willingness to share information about herself and who she was and where she had come from and those things resonated with me and so we built a very natural very close connection in those first really hours if you will and that for me was just critical to not only getting successfully through the Accelerator and setting those goals but then taking that and moving into a relationship. A couple of things that I can do now after working with Karen and this is one of the reasons why I really wanted to have a personal coaching relationship for me in my case I sponsored myself was because those some of the personal things were the things I wanted to work on how to have frankly conversations with people that I love and that I trust, how do I have those conversations in a way that is loving and kind and she really helped me to think through how to have those conversations when they need to occur. The work stuff is absolutely where we spend most of our time if I'm being completely honest but when those personal things come up being able to have the tools to have those conversations has been really, really valuable. So I would absolutely recommend Karen as a coach. I think she does a great job of trying to help you understand the things that you can control and thinking about across the spectrum of the opportunities and challenges that you bring to her when you work with her in these sessions. Helping you to understand those things and how can impact them, helping to remind you that you have no control over anyone but yourself, helping you to set really both manageable and big goals and then moving towards those and those are really important to me, those are things that I appreciate and value and that's one of the reasons why I hired her and should as well. So as a result of working with Karen I recently was offered and accepted my dream job and I am just beyond thrilled at this opportunity and Karen really helped me from a career perspective in particular to manage some of the hurdles that I've had in the last five years to get me to this point and I'm so appreciative of that.